The Tommyknockers (22 page)

The face looking back from the mirror wasn't as bad as he had feared, but he noted with some dismay that his nose had bled again in the night—not a lot, but enough to have covered his philtrum and most of his upper lip. He got a facecloth out of the cupboard to the right of the sink and turned on the hot water to wet it down.

He put the facecloth under the water flowing from the hot tap with all the absentmindedness of long habit—with Bobbi's water heater, you just about had time for a cup of coffee and a smoke before you got a lukewarm stream—and that was on a good d—

“Youch!”

He pulled his hand back from water so hot it was steaming. Okay, that was what he got for assuming Bobbi was just going to go clipclopping down the road of life without ever getting her damned water heater fixed.

Gardener put his scalded palm to his mouth and looked at the water coming out of the tap. It had already fogged the lower edge of the shaving mirror on the back of the medicine cabinet. He reached out, found the tap's handle almost too hot to touch, and used the facecloth to turn it off. Then he put in the rubber plug, drew a little more hot water—cautiously!—and added a generous dollop of cold. The pad of flesh below his left thumb had reddened a little.

He opened the medicine cabinet and moved things around until he came to the prescription bottle of Valium with his own name on the label.
If that stuff improves with age, it ought to be great,
he thought. Still almost full. Well, what did he expect? Whatever Bobbi had been using, it sure as hell had been the opposite of Valium.

Gardener didn't want it either. He wanted what was behind it, if it was still—

Ah! Success!

He pulled out a double-edge razor and a package of blades. He looked a little sadly at the layer of dust on the razor—it had been a long time since he'd shaved in the morning here at Bobbi's—and then rinsed it off.
At least she didn't throw it out,
he thought.
That would have been worse than the dust.

A shave made him feel better. He concentrated on it, drawing it out while his thoughts ran their own course.

He finished, replaced the shaving stuff behind the Valium, and cleaned up. Then he looked thoughtfully at the tap with the H on its handle, and decided to go down cellar and see what sort of magnificent water heater Bobbi had put in. The only other thing to do was watch Bobbi sleep, which she seemed to be doing well on her own.

He crossed into the kitchen thinking that he really did feel well, especially now that the aches from a night in Bobbi's rocking chair were starting to work out of his back and neck.
You're the guy who's never been able to sleep sitting up, right?
he jeered softly at himself.
Crashing out on breakwaters is more your style, right?
But this ribbing was nothing like the harsh, barely coherent self-mockery of the day before. The one thing he always forgot in the grip of the hangovers and the terrible post-jag depressions was the feeling of regeneration that
sometimes came later. You could wake up one day realizing you hadn't put any poison in your system the night before . . . the week before . . . maybe the whole
month
before . . . and you felt really good.

As for what he had been afraid must be the onset of the flu, maybe even pneumonia—that was gone too. No sore throat. No plugged nose. No fever. God knew he had been a perfect target for a germ, after eight days drinking, sleeping rough, and finally hitching back to Maine in his bare feet during a rainstorm. But it had passed off in the night. Sometimes God was good.

He paused in the middle of the kitchen, his smile drifting away into a momentary expression that was puzzled and a little disquieted. A fragment of his dream—or dreams—came slipping back

(radio ads in the night 
. . .
does that have something to do with feeling well this morning?)

and then it faded again. He dismissed it, content with the fact that he felt well and Bobbi looked well—better, anyway. If Bobbi wasn't awake by ten o'clock, ten-thirty at the latest, he would wake her up. If Bobbi felt better and spoke rationally, fine. They could discuss whatever had happened to her (
SOMETHING
sure did
, Gardener thought, and wondered absently if she had gotten some terrible news report from home . . . a bulletin that would undoubtedly have been served up by Sister Anne). They would go on from there. If she still even slightly resembled the spaced-out and rather creepy Bobbi Anderson who had greeted him the night before, Gardener was going to call a doctor whether Bobbi liked it or not.

He opened the cellar door and fumbled for the old-fashioned toggle switch on the wall. He found it. The switch was the same. The light wasn't. Instead of the feeble flow from two sixty-watt bulbs—the only illumination in Bobbi's cellar since time out of mind—the cellar lit up with a brisk white glare. It looked as bright as a discount department store down there. Gardener started down, hand reaching for the rickety old banister. He found a thick and solid new one instead. It was held firmly against the wall with new brass fittings. Some of the stair treads, which had been definitely queasy, had also been replaced.

Gardener reached the bottom of the steps and stood looking around, his surprise now bordering on some
stronger emotion—it was almost shock. That slightly moldy root-cellar smell was gone, too.

She looked like a woman running on empty, no joke. Right out on the ragged edge. She couldn't even remember how many days it had been since she'd gotten any sleep. No wonder. I've heard of home improvement, but this is ridiculous. She couldn't have done it all herself, though. Could she? Of course not.

But Gardener suspected that, somehow, Bobbi had.

If Gardener had awakened here instead of on the breakwater at Arcadia Point, with no memory of the immediate past, he wouldn't have known he was in Bobbi's cellar, although he had been here countless times before. The only reason he was sure of it now was because he had gotten here from Bobbi's kitchen.

That rooty smell
wasn't
entirely gone, but it was diminished. The cellar's dirt floor had been neatly raked—no, not
just
raked, Gardener saw. Cellar dirt got old and sour after a while; you had to do something about it if you planned to be spending much time belowground. Anderson had apparently brought in a fresh load of dirt and had spread it around to dry before raking. Gardener supposed that was what had sweetened the atmosphere of the place.

Fluorescents were racked in overhead rows, each hooded fixture hung from the old beams by chains and more brass fittings. They shed an even white glow. All the fixtures were single tubes except for those over the worktable; those each had a pair, so here the glow was so bright that it made Gardener think of operating theaters. He walked over to Bobbi's worktable. Bobbi's
new
worktable.

Anderson had had an ordinary kitchen table covered with dirty Con-Tact paper before. It had been lit with a gooseneck study lamp and littered with a few tools, most of them not in very good condition, and a few plastic boxes of nails, screws, bolts, and the like. It was the small-repairs workplace of a woman who is neither very good nor very interested in small repairs.

The old kitchen table was gone, replaced by three long, light tables, the sort on which bake-sale goods are placed at church sales. They had been placed end to end along the left side of the cellar to make one long table. It
was littered with hardware, tools, spools of insulated wire both thin and thick, coffee cans full of brads and staples and fasteners . . . dozens of other items. Or hundreds.

Then there were the batteries.

There was a carton of them under the table, a huge loose collection of long-life batteries still in their blister-packs: C-cells, D-cells, double-A's, triple-A's, nine-volts.
Must be two hundred dollars' worth in there,
Gardener thought,
and more rolling around on the table. What in the blue hell—?

Dazed, he walked along the table like a man checking out the merchandise and deciding whether or not to buy. It looked as though Bobbi was making several different things at once . . . and Gardener was not sure what any of them were. Here, standing halfway along the table, was a large square box with its front panel slid aside to reveal eighteen different buttons. Beside each button was the title of a popular song—“Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head,” “New York, New York,” “Lara's Theme,” and so on. Next to it, an instruction sheet tacked neatly to the table identified it as the one-and-only SilverChime Digital Doorbell (Made in Taiwan).

Gardener couldn't imagine why Bobbi would want a doorbell with a built-in microchip that would allow the user to program a different song whenever she wanted to—did she think Joe Paulson would dig hearing “Lara's Theme” when he had to come to the door with a package? But that wasn't all. Gardener could at least have understood the
use
of the SilverChime Digital Doorbell, if not Bobbi's motivation in installing one. But she seemed to be in the process of
modifying
the thing somehow—hooking it, in fact, into the workings of a boom-box radio the size of a small suitcase.

Half a dozen wires-—four thin, two moderately thick—snaked between the radio
(its
instruction sheet also tacked neatly to the table) and the opened gut of the SilverChime.

Gardener looked at this for some time and then passed on.

Breakdown. She's had a very odd sort of mental breakdown. The kind Pat Summerall would love.

Here was something else he recognized—a furnace accessory called a rebreather. You attached it to the flue and it was supposed to recirculate some of the heat that
ordinarily got wasted. It was the sort of gadget Bobbi would see in a catalogue, or maybe in the Augusta Trustworthy Hardware Store, and talk about buying. She never actually would, though, because if she bought it she would have to install it.

But now she apparently
had
bought it . . . and installed it.

You can't say she's having a breakdown and “that's all,” because when someone who's really creative highsides it, it's rarely a case of “that's all.” Crackups are never pretty, but when someone like Bobbi tips over, it can be sort of amazing. Just look at this shit.

Do you believe that?

Yeah, I do. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns-—you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns. If you don't believe it, I repeat: look at this shit.

Over there was the water heater, a white cylindrical bulk to the right of the root-cellar door. It
looked
the same, but . . .

Gardener went over, wanting to see how Bobbi had souped it up so radically.

She's gone on a mad home-improvement kick. And the nuttiest thing is that she doesn't seem to have differentiated between things like fixing the water heater and customizing doorbells. New banister. Fresh dirt brought in and raked over the floor of the root cellar. Christ knows what else. No wonder she's exhausted. And just by the bye, Gard, where did Bobbi come by the
know-how
to do all this stuff? If it was a correspondence course from
Popular Mechanix
, she must have really crammed.

His first dazed surprise at coming on this nutty workshop in Bobbi's basement was becoming deepening unease. It wasn't just the evidences of obsessive behavior that he saw along that table—heaps of equipment too neatly organized, all four corners of the instruction sheets tacked down—that bothered him. Nor was it the evidence of mania in Bobbi's apparent failure to discriminate between worthwhile renovations and nonsensical (
apparently
nonsensical, Gardener amended) ones.

What gave Gardener the creeps was thinking about—
trying
to think about—the huge, the
profligate
amounts
of energy that had been expended here. To have done just those things he had seen so far, Bobbi must have blazed like a torch. There were projects like the fluorescent lights which had already been completed. There were the ones still pending. There were the trips to Augusta she must have needed to make to get all the equipment, hardware, and batteries.
Plus getting sweet dirt to replace the sour, don't forget that.

What could have driven her to it?

Gardener didn't know, but he didn't like to imagine Bobbi here, racing back and forth, working on two different do-it-yourself projects at once, or five, or ten. The image was too clear. Bobbi with the sleeves of her shirt rolled up and the top three buttons undone, beads of sweat trickling down between her small breasts, her hair pulled back in a rough horsetail, eyes burning, face pale except for two hectic red patches, one in each cheek. Bobbi looking like Ms. Wizard gone insane, growing more haggard as she screwed screws, bolted bolts, soldered wires, trucked in dirt, and stood on her stepladder, bent backward like a ballet dancer, sweat running down her face, cords standing out in her neck as she hung up the new lights. Oh, and while you're at it, don't forget Bobbi putting in the new wiring and fixing the hot-water tank.

Gardener touched the tank's enamel side and pulled his hand back fast. It
looked
the same, but it wasn't. It was hot as hell. He squatted and opened the hatch at the bottom of the tank.

That was when Gardener
really
sailed off the edge of the world.

Before, the water heater had run on LP gas. The smallbore copper tubes which fed gas to the tank's burner ran from tanks in a hook-up behind the house. The delivery truck from Dead River Gas in Derry came once a month and replaced the tanks if they needed replacing—usually they did, because the tank was wasteful as well as inefficient . . . two things that went together more often than not, now that Gard thought about it. The first thing Gardener noticed was that the copper tubes were no longer hooked
into the tank. They hung free behind it, their ends stuffed with cloth.